Software is just software people. In the big wide world it just doesn't matter whether someone runs Linux or they run Windows 2000. Linux, and the whole free software "revolution" is not going to change the world into some utopian paradise. But by describing it in metaphors of struggle and revolution ("Men of Zeal" indeed!) it overstates the importance of a minor squabble over the right to have access to source code. Freedom is much more important than software.
I agree with the final sentence wholeheartedly. However, open source is a tool for freedom. The reason is that computers and networks are now our tools for publication and conversation. So long as we have control over the software, file formats and protocols used, we are free to speak our minds. If I speak out against someone, I am not constrained by a software license that may be revoked under some pretext to silence me.
The whole point of this article, and the very apt quote from Justice Brandeis, is that the encroachments on freedom that enable horrible abuses do not themselves seem significant. It is the small, well-intentioned changes that make the largers ones later possible.
Fred Brooks wrote about this in The Mythical Man-Month. I believe he called it the "second system effect". It does indeed exist inside Cathedrals as well.
One of the things that mitigates its effects in open source is that few projects get started without a working prototype. A lone programmer scratches an itch first, and then goes looking for a pool of users/co-developers to find and fix bugs and extend the concept.
The idea that large corps don't review their code explains why their click-wrap licenses claim they can't be held accountable for thebugs.
The article and this comment remind me of how pleasant my current boss' attitude is. As far as he is concerned, code reviews aren't about the formal process. Reviewing code is something programmers do. If you are going to work on it, you have to review it to understand it. As a result, he encourages us to raise issues with possible bugs and ways to improve it. But then, it's nice to be able to say, "My boss writes good code."
One of the things that is more common in the Open Source world is clear statements of requirements and design documents. Either that, or the vague and incomprehensible ones disappear rather than being completed and archived by mandate. The reason they are clear is that if they exist at all, it is because they were written with the deliberate intention to communicate with other developers. They aren't written because the process says we have to have them. They aren't written to communicate with a vaguely understood audience. They aren't written to adhere to a formal template. And, in a sense, the working code serves as documentation for the design. If you want collaborators, you'd better make it comprehensible.
When you post a note to a mailing list or newsgroup that starts with "Hey, I want [insert program name here] to do [insert feature here]" and ends with "Here's a patch that does about a third of what I'm trying to accomplish," that is a design in a real sense. The reason that source code is human readable is that it serves as a means of communication. It documents what the program does, for other developers and for the original author across the gulf of time. Open source projects are often written with an explicit understanding of that.
Obviously, there is a tie-in between this an a recent Slashdot poll. With this jacket and a networked washer and drier, your laundry can set the correct cycle itself! Imagine the uses:
"Honey, the washer is refusing to start."
"That's because your white shirts won't allow it to until you remove our son's red shorts."
Must-attend event for suits now
on
LinuxWorld
·
· Score: 2
Redherring has an interesting art icle saying that while Linuxworld is still a safe-haven for geeks, it has become a must-attend event for suits. My read of this is quite simple. They called us crazy, idealists, and starry-eyed optimists. They hoped we'd go away because we challenged the status quo. Now we can't be ignored. We've been right all along. Open source development works.
Dell needs to put a link to their Linux support page somewhere on their main page. I'd settle for a link at the bottom that says "We also seel systems with Linux preinstalled". I'm looking for a new system anyway, and I am considering buying from Dell, but I need to be able to find the configurations in question.
ZDNet is running this article suggesting possible plans for Corel in the wake of this. It is shot and worth the read, but I will quote the final item from their list of possibilities:
7. Go out of business, but leave a legacy. We know this isn't considered much of an option, but the facts are still grim. Corel doesn't have a lot of cash and competes against Microsoft, Adobe and Red Hat to name a few. Even if Corel gets its act together, it's going to be tough to build its market capitalization. If all fails -- and it might -- go out of business and open the code to all of Corel's software so anyone who wants it can still use it and modify it. There won't be a Corel, but there'll be a legacy.
Let's get the EFF to sue them, and force them to settle for something reasonable... like sending $100 PER THESIS SOLD to a fund that will help 2600 in its legal battles...
Why limit it to $100? Go for the full cost of the degree, including tuition, books, whatever. And insist on a complete list of name of all the people it was sold to. Sue them, and notify their thesis committees that they have purchased copies, just to protect against further plagurism.
With Sun on board and the announcement that StarOffice would be released under the GPL, I suspected that StarOffice would be an important component of this project. Am I wrong?
Certainly, it isn't completely in line with Miguel's vision for the future of Gnome, but it could provide a lot of valuable code. What we have afterwards may not be completely recognizable as StarOffice, but that isn't important.
How do I make a list of keywords that will satisfy that requirement yet allow someone to look up breast cancer research, or the recipe to chicken Parmesan?
The bottom line is that you can't. The reason is pretty simple and has been stated here many times before concerning cernsorware. Forbidden content is subject to interpretation within a cultural context. What is legal today may not be tomorrow and vice versa.
But let me offer a specific example. Let's assume for the moment that you are using the keywords in part to screen out sites/pages that may contain verboten images. My use of German there was not merely for the stronger connotations that word has to the English-speaking audience. It is to illustrate my point. Even assuming you have a complete list of such keywords in English, do you have them for every other language in common use on the net?
There is a tendency for each person to believe that the Web is simply a larger version of the corner he has seen. In some senses that is true. However, English monoglots may make the mistake of forgetting that much of the additional material is unreadable to them because they don't speak the language.
And you bring up the issue of protecting the children. While you appear reluctant to use that as an excuse for filtering the content you will serve to your users, it is often an excuse for curtailing the rights of adults. And, it is often quite unsuccessful in its original intent. Those junior high school students may be taking foreign languages. I remember from my own school days that unofficial bawdy lexicons were in circulation within the first month of any first year language course. Unless you intend to filter those words as well, your quest is hopeless.
As for the jargon of youth.... I have actually researched slang enough to realize that much of what today's teenagers believe is modern slang has been recycled from decades ago, when their grandparents or great-grandparents furtively used it. Their parents are unaware of it which lends it a new currency. Nonetheless, the body of current slang terms for what you would block is a moving target.
The Web is a big place. It is constantly shifting and changing as a reflection of the cultures that it is embedded in. It is impossible to freeze a snapshot of it and forever have it behave as it did for a moment in time.
It makes me wonder if someday some spammer could raise a stink and actually successfully get such a restraining order. Maybe it would be a good idea for the list to be distributed across multiple jurisdictions.
Just to be sure that no one who has gotten a restraining order issued is accidentally contained on any of those lists, it will be necessary to keep another list:
There are currently valid restraining orders prohibiting inclusion of the following addresses in the list. Any such addresses must be removed from all copies:
Which of the following can't be used to distribute pirated copyrighted data?
ftp
Apache
nntp an your favorite newsreader
E-mail clients and transport agents
An important question to ask is whether more piracy has been committed using Napster or Microsoft Outlook Express. Measure it in incidents or megabytes. How much copyrighted material has been e-mailed, posted to Usenet and posted on Web sites using Microsoft Outlook Express and read using it as well.
I want to be very clear about this. I am not criticizing Outlook Express. I also don't believe for a minute that Microsoft every intended it to be a piracy tool. Nor do I believe that Microsoft should be liable in any way for the fact that it can be used that way.
Any tool that allows us to publish any data can allow us to publish someone else's copyrighted data in violation of that copyright. Failing to hold the person who committed the violation liable and attacking the programmer who wrote the software instead is at best simply choosing a target of opportunity, who may have partial culpability. At worst, it is scapegoating and a search for deep pockets.
It is time for the owners of the blocked sites to sue. They should demand that their sites be reinstated immediately. They should demand a guarantee that their sites will never be blocked in the future.
I feel certain that it will remain possible to trick the censorware in both directions for the foreseeable future. There will continue to be false negatives and false positives. The problem is that the image these companies are selling doesn't match with the fine print about the product reliability. And the actual performance has been proven to be even worse than that several times for some of them.
This is something you'll never see taught in a resume course. BE YOURSELF. If you're not, you won't be happy in the job - because they didn't hire you, they hired that person in the book.
This is the core of successful networking, in the older sense of personal networks. If you are comfortable with who you are. If you spend time with people who share your interests and can help you to expand them. If you convey a sense of what is important to you. Those things will give you an edge. The reason that networking works is that people are more comfortable with someone they know than someone they don't.
I've been on the other side of the interviewing desk. I've found myself saying things like, "They all three sounded good and looked good on paper, but who will I be able to work with." I'm glad that I was brought in to ask the technical questions in the inteviews and that I didn't have to make the hiring decisions.
Ask yourself a valuable question. Do you know people, outside your current company, who you would want to work with? Would they want to work with you? Those people are the start of your network.
Gartner laid out a typical scenario: A corporation purchases 5,000 PCs from Hewlett-Packard with Windows 2000 installed. But the company puts its own custom software on the systems using Select media provided by Microsoft. By Microsoft's interpretation, the customer would be required to pay an extra $117 to $157 per computer--or $585,000 to $758,000 total--for the right to install the Windows 2000 it had already paid HP for.
There is too much invested, by Microsoft, industry gurus, and corporate IS departments, in the theory that the total cost of ownership of Windows is lower than the alternatives. This shoots a pretty big hole in that theory. I foresee Microsoft offering some new licensing program that eliminates this cost. And they will tout it as part of their longstanding support of the best interests of their customers. The bottom line, of course, is that Microsoft is in business to make money. This is really bad PR with their best markets.
I just had a look at Muffin (mentioned in the article). It seems to me that the way to get rid of these invasive tactics is to attack them. Instead of filtering out all cookies and WebBugs, build a filter that returns a standard response. When you are probed for a cookie, return one that contains the GNU Manifesto or a randomly selected file from the Mozilla source.
There is also an Extreme Programming web site. You might also want to visit The Programmers' Stone. It offers some interesting insights into how programmers think. It might change your view of what is happening inside your head when you get programmer's block.
They are giving very balanced coverage to this and actually educating the public about it. Just look at the fact that they went to the trouble to run a related story earlier in the broadcast to ensure that their listeners were aware of the issues before they heard the story about Napster and RIAA.
There is quite a bit of flaming going on over the distinction between the Web and the Internet. I was rather pleased to see that both the Nature and BBC articles explicitly mentioned that both can be modelled as scale-free networks.
I think that there is an important point to be made concerning the Web. The nodes and pages and the edges and links. But our lists of bookmarks consist of nodes with lots of outgoing links. Also, there are links that are connected logically, but not physically. URLs in magazines, on TV and radio, on T-shirts and billboards are logically part of the Web. There are nodes that can't be taken down via the Internet. That is the crux of the argument that many searches begin with URLs that are typed by the user.
I think Napster can work for new talent, I've personally supported artists via MP3.com, but I still don't see anyone able to make a living off these services yet.
I don't think that there is any reason that we have to view online distribution of MP3s as a complete business model for musicians. First of all, at the moment they are operating in a world where there are established distribution channels that nearly everyone is aware of. If you want a CD, go to the store or order it online. What percentage of the music-buying public knows that MP3.com is out there? My parents probably don't.
Second, why should musicians ever give up actually playing in front of audiences? I love live music. One of the most interesting performances I have ever heard was a little-known band jamming with a friend of mine after a show one night. Three very talented guitarists doing things with the music that required all three of them. It wouldn't have happened in a studio. Okay, few musicians make a living performing live, but it is another part of the equation.
What I'm getting at here is that the fact that nobody is making a living via MP3.com doesn't mean that it doesn't have a place. Are there musicians who can point out how their audience has grown through their exposure there? Are they making money at it? Personally, I'm looking forward to the day when somebody like MP3.com sponsors webcasts for obscure groups.
I look at music online from a very biased perspective. I have non-mainstream tastes (unusual celtic bands, filk, and some even less mainstream stuff). I look at the net as a way to build audiences big enough for the musicians I like to continue performing and recording. I can't get to their performances, and the record stores don't carry their CDs. This is about, among other things, the survival of diversity.
National Public Radio's show Morning Edition has been following the trial in a series of articles. The account has been reasonably balanced and fairly thorough. If you want to point your non-geek relatives to a site that will give them the background on this, these stories are a good place to start. The first one, aired yesterday, can be found here (Napster Legal Dispute). Another one was aired this morning and has not been put on their web site yet.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with the final sentence wholeheartedly. However, open source is a tool for freedom. The reason is that computers and networks are now our tools for publication and conversation. So long as we have control over the software, file formats and protocols used, we are free to speak our minds. If I speak out against someone, I am not constrained by a software license that may be revoked under some pretext to silence me.
The whole point of this article, and the very apt quote from Justice Brandeis, is that the encroachments on freedom that enable horrible abuses do not themselves seem significant. It is the small, well-intentioned changes that make the largers ones later possible.
Fred Brooks wrote about this in The Mythical Man-Month. I believe he called it the "second system effect". It does indeed exist inside Cathedrals as well.
One of the things that mitigates its effects in open source is that few projects get started without a working prototype. A lone programmer scratches an itch first, and then goes looking for a pool of users/co-developers to find and fix bugs and extend the concept.
The article and this comment remind me of how pleasant my current boss' attitude is. As far as he is concerned, code reviews aren't about the formal process. Reviewing code is something programmers do. If you are going to work on it, you have to review it to understand it. As a result, he encourages us to raise issues with possible bugs and ways to improve it. But then, it's nice to be able to say, "My boss writes good code."
One of the things that is more common in the Open Source world is clear statements of requirements and design documents. Either that, or the vague and incomprehensible ones disappear rather than being completed and archived by mandate. The reason they are clear is that if they exist at all, it is because they were written with the deliberate intention to communicate with other developers. They aren't written because the process says we have to have them. They aren't written to communicate with a vaguely understood audience. They aren't written to adhere to a formal template. And, in a sense, the working code serves as documentation for the design. If you want collaborators, you'd better make it comprehensible.
When you post a note to a mailing list or newsgroup that starts with "Hey, I want [insert program name here] to do [insert feature here]" and ends with "Here's a patch that does about a third of what I'm trying to accomplish," that is a design in a real sense. The reason that source code is human readable is that it serves as a means of communication. It documents what the program does, for other developers and for the original author across the gulf of time. Open source projects are often written with an explicit understanding of that.
"Honey, the washer is refusing to start."
"That's because your white shirts won't allow it to until you remove our son's red shorts."
Redherring has an interesting art icle saying that while Linuxworld is still a safe-haven for geeks, it has become a must-attend event for suits. My read of this is quite simple. They called us crazy, idealists, and starry-eyed optimists. They hoped we'd go away because we challenged the status quo. Now we can't be ignored. We've been right all along. Open source development works.
Dell needs to put a link to their Linux support page somewhere on their main page. I'd settle for a link at the bottom that says "We also seel systems with Linux preinstalled". I'm looking for a new system anyway, and I am considering buying from Dell, but I need to be able to find the configurations in question.
Why limit it to $100? Go for the full cost of the degree, including tuition, books, whatever. And insist on a complete list of name of all the people it was sold to. Sue them, and notify their thesis committees that they have purchased copies, just to protect against further plagurism.
With Sun on board and the announcement that StarOffice would be released under the GPL, I suspected that StarOffice would be an important component of this project. Am I wrong?
Certainly, it isn't completely in line with Miguel's vision for the future of Gnome, but it could provide a lot of valuable code. What we have afterwards may not be completely recognizable as StarOffice, but that isn't important.
The bottom line is that you can't. The reason is pretty simple and has been stated here many times before concerning cernsorware. Forbidden content is subject to interpretation within a cultural context. What is legal today may not be tomorrow and vice versa.
But let me offer a specific example. Let's assume for the moment that you are using the keywords in part to screen out sites/pages that may contain verboten images. My use of German there was not merely for the stronger connotations that word has to the English-speaking audience. It is to illustrate my point. Even assuming you have a complete list of such keywords in English, do you have them for every other language in common use on the net?
There is a tendency for each person to believe that the Web is simply a larger version of the corner he has seen. In some senses that is true. However, English monoglots may make the mistake of forgetting that much of the additional material is unreadable to them because they don't speak the language.
And you bring up the issue of protecting the children. While you appear reluctant to use that as an excuse for filtering the content you will serve to your users, it is often an excuse for curtailing the rights of adults. And, it is often quite unsuccessful in its original intent. Those junior high school students may be taking foreign languages. I remember from my own school days that unofficial bawdy lexicons were in circulation within the first month of any first year language course. Unless you intend to filter those words as well, your quest is hopeless.
As for the jargon of youth
The Web is a big place. It is constantly shifting and changing as a reflection of the cultures that it is embedded in. It is impossible to freeze a snapshot of it and forever have it behave as it did for a moment in time.
That is the first site I've visited in weeks where I didn't mind waiting for the graphics to download.
Of course not. I applied back in the 80's. I haven't heard from them yet.
Just to be sure that no one who has gotten a restraining order issued is accidentally contained on any of those lists, it will be necessary to keep another list:
There are currently valid restraining orders prohibiting inclusion of the following addresses in the list. Any such addresses must be removed from all copies:
foo.bar.com
spam.twice.a.day.com
I do not want a key anywhere on my "LinuxCalc" labelled "rm". Two keystrokes is the absolute minimum that I want to type to remove anything!
An important question to ask is whether more piracy has been committed using Napster or Microsoft Outlook Express. Measure it in incidents or megabytes. How much copyrighted material has been e-mailed, posted to Usenet and posted on Web sites using Microsoft Outlook Express and read using it as well.
I want to be very clear about this. I am not criticizing Outlook Express. I also don't believe for a minute that Microsoft every intended it to be a piracy tool. Nor do I believe that Microsoft should be liable in any way for the fact that it can be used that way.
Any tool that allows us to publish any data can allow us to publish someone else's copyrighted data in violation of that copyright. Failing to hold the person who committed the violation liable and attacking the programmer who wrote the software instead is at best simply choosing a target of opportunity, who may have partial culpability. At worst, it is scapegoating and a search for deep pockets.
It is time for the owners of the blocked sites to sue. They should demand that their sites be reinstated immediately. They should demand a guarantee that their sites will never be blocked in the future.
I feel certain that it will remain possible to trick the censorware in both directions for the foreseeable future. There will continue to be false negatives and false positives. The problem is that the image these companies are selling doesn't match with the fine print about the product reliability. And the actual performance has been proven to be even worse than that several times for some of them.
This is the core of successful networking, in the older sense of personal networks. If you are comfortable with who you are. If you spend time with people who share your interests and can help you to expand them. If you convey a sense of what is important to you. Those things will give you an edge. The reason that networking works is that people are more comfortable with someone they know than someone they don't.
I've been on the other side of the interviewing desk. I've found myself saying things like, "They all three sounded good and looked good on paper, but who will I be able to work with." I'm glad that I was brought in to ask the technical questions in the inteviews and that I didn't have to make the hiring decisions.
Ask yourself a valuable question. Do you know people, outside your current company, who you would want to work with? Would they want to work with you? Those people are the start of your network.
There is too much invested, by Microsoft, industry gurus, and corporate IS departments, in the theory that the total cost of ownership of Windows is lower than the alternatives. This shoots a pretty big hole in that theory. I foresee Microsoft offering some new licensing program that eliminates this cost. And they will tout it as part of their longstanding support of the best interests of their customers. The bottom line, of course, is that Microsoft is in business to make money. This is really bad PR with their best markets.
I just had a look at Muffin (mentioned in the article). It seems to me that the way to get rid of these invasive tactics is to attack them. Instead of filtering out all cookies and WebBugs, build a filter that returns a standard response. When you are probed for a cookie, return one that contains the GNU Manifesto or a randomly selected file from the Mozilla source.
There is also an Extreme Programming web site. You might also want to visit The Programmers' Stone. It offers some interesting insights into how programmers think. It might change your view of what is happening inside your head when you get programmer's block.
They are giving very balanced coverage to this and actually educating the public about it. Just look at the fact that they went to the trouble to run a related story earlier in the broadcast to ensure that their listeners were aware of the issues before they heard the story about Napster and RIAA.
There is quite a bit of flaming going on over the distinction between the Web and the Internet. I was rather pleased to see that both the Nature and BBC articles explicitly mentioned that both can be modelled as scale-free networks.
I think that there is an important point to be made concerning the Web. The nodes and pages and the edges and links. But our lists of bookmarks consist of nodes with lots of outgoing links. Also, there are links that are connected logically, but not physically. URLs in magazines, on TV and radio, on T-shirts and billboards are logically part of the Web. There are nodes that can't be taken down via the Internet. That is the crux of the argument that many searches begin with URLs that are typed by the user.
I don't think that there is any reason that we have to view online distribution of MP3s as a complete business model for musicians. First of all, at the moment they are operating in a world where there are established distribution channels that nearly everyone is aware of. If you want a CD, go to the store or order it online. What percentage of the music-buying public knows that MP3.com is out there? My parents probably don't.
Second, why should musicians ever give up actually playing in front of audiences? I love live music. One of the most interesting performances I have ever heard was a little-known band jamming with a friend of mine after a show one night. Three very talented guitarists doing things with the music that required all three of them. It wouldn't have happened in a studio. Okay, few musicians make a living performing live, but it is another part of the equation.
What I'm getting at here is that the fact that nobody is making a living via MP3.com doesn't mean that it doesn't have a place. Are there musicians who can point out how their audience has grown through their exposure there? Are they making money at it? Personally, I'm looking forward to the day when somebody like MP3.com sponsors webcasts for obscure groups.
I look at music online from a very biased perspective. I have non-mainstream tastes (unusual celtic bands, filk, and some even less mainstream stuff). I look at the net as a way to build audiences big enough for the musicians I like to continue performing and recording. I can't get to their performances, and the record stores don't carry their CDs. This is about, among other things, the survival of diversity.
National Public Radio's show Morning Edition has been following the trial in a series of articles. The account has been reasonably balanced and fairly thorough. If you want to point your non-geek relatives to a site that will give them the background on this, these stories are a good place to start. The first one, aired yesterday, can be found here (Napster Legal Dispute). Another one was aired this morning and has not been put on their web site yet.